In this episode, our guest is Ben Recht. Ben is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.  We discuss several topics, including his research trajectory, Ben's tour of reinforcement learning, and his passion for music, among others. Check out Ben's website here: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/ Outline 00:00 - Intro  01:01 - Ben predicts the birth of "inControl" 02:40 - Personal research trajectory 06:55 - How and why did you dive into control theory? 08:43 - Influential figures who shaped Ben's research 13:50 -  The "argmin" blog &  myth busting 27:43 - Ben's tour of reinforcement learning 45:18 - Future challenges for control 52:06 - Biological origin of learning 58:24 - "This or that" game 1:02:54 - Questions from the audience 1:14:51 - What would you do if you were a student today? 1:17:00 - Ben's band: "the fun years" Episode links Ben's website: http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/ argmin: http://www.argmin.net/ the fun years: http://thefunyears.com/ A tour of reinforcement learning: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.09460 Patterns, predictions and actions: http://mlstory.org/ System level synthesis: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01634 Aizerman's conjecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aizerman%27s_conjecture Podcast info Podcast website: https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/incontrol/id1624068002 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7dZvt77XNtHxyrFqM8YTwf RSS: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/1632769.rss Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl83hwBSVRLYj2NWS08P9bg/featured Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InControl-podcast-114303337936834 Twitter: https://twitter.com/IncontrolP Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/incontrol_podcast/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/incontrolpodcast/ Acknowledgments and sponsors This episode was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research on «Dependable, ubiquitous automation», which you can check here: https://nccr-automation.ch/nccr-automation The podcast benefits from the help of an incredibly talented and passionate team. Special thanks to Arian Bastani, Benjamin Sawicki, Elise Cahard, Florian Dorfler, Frederik Banis, John Lygeros, ETH studio (Philipp Zumbrunnen), and mirrorlake studio (Roman Frischknecht). The support of the Swiss National Science Foundation is also gratefully acknowledged.  Music was composed by A New Element. Support the show